By Alex Gordon in Haifa, Israel
On November 10, 2018, the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, journalist of The Times of Israel Matt Lebovic discussed the attitudes of American Jews toward the events of Kristallnacht on November 9-10, 1938:
“When American Jews learned of Nazi Germany’s Kristallnacht pogrom 80 years ago, the community’s leaders were determined to keep a lid on people’s emotions. During the night of November 9-10, Nazi-led “demonstrators” murdered 100 German Jews in a nationwide orgy of violence. Thirty thousand Jews were rounded up for concentration camps, and more than 200 synagogues became smoldering ruins.
Although the pogrom was described as Germany’s most bloody assault on Jews since the Middle Ages, few Jewish leaders in the US were prepared to agitate. Most notably, the influential General Jewish Council insisted on maintaining radio silence following Kristallnacht.”
“When FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) asked his closest Jewish adviser, Samuel Rosenman — a prominent member of the American Jewish Committee — if more Jewish refugees should be allowed to enter the U.S. in the wake of Kristallnacht, Rosenman opposed such a move because ‘it would create a Jewish problem in the US,’” wrote Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
“Jews today – even Jewish leaders – recall the 1930’s as a period of excessive Jewish timidity,” wrote historian Steven Bayme in an analysis of books about American Jewish leaders’ responses to the Holocaust. “Elie Wiesel, for one, has argued that Jews ought to have chained themselves to the White House until such time as Roosevelt was willing to act.”
In recent years, this statement has been used by researchers to explain the “timid” response of American Jewish leaders during five years of escalating Nazi persecution that culminated in Kristallnacht. Six months after the pogrom, FDR again signaled his feelings by refusing to permit 900 German Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis to enter the US, and most of them fell under Nazi rule again. According to historians, the president’s Jewish advisers — and most of the country’s Jewish leaders — made it easy for FDR to ignore the plight of German Jews, of whom 400,000 did not escape Germany before the pogrom of 1938.
“[After Kristallnacht] there were many verbal condemnations, but no economic sanctions against Nazi Germany, no severing of diplomatic relations, no easing of immigration quotas, not even a complete opening of the gates to the Jews’ own ancient homeland,” wrote Rafael Medoff. “The Free World’s muted reaction to the Kristallnacht pogrom foreshadowed the terrible silence with which it would greet the Nazis’ Final Solution.”
As might be expected after Kristallnacht, for American Jews the fate of European Jews during the Holocaust was of little interest, a secondary issue. No Jewish solidarity was shown by them. Their reaction was “disproportionate,” ignoring the dangers facing the Jewish people in Europe.
Saul Bellow, a Jewish American writer and Nobel Prize winner for Literature, wrote bitterly about this: “We must deal more fully, more deeply with the Holocaust. No one in America took it seriously, and only a few Jews somewhere (like Primo Levi) were capable of understanding it. All parties were responsible then, and every honest person feels ashamed of it.” American Jews did nothing to ensure that Jews fleeing Europe, Jews in distress, received entry visas and escaped to the United States. Irving Howe, a Jewish American democratic socialist, later called this neglect of the Holocaust in the U.S. “a serious moral failure on our part.”
In the essay The Moral Failure of American Jewish Intellectuals in the book Jews Against Themselves (2015), American researcher Edward Alexander writes about the silence of “American Jewish intellectuals” and notes their “deafness” to the danger of the Holocaust and to the significance of the revival of the Jewish state. He draws an analogy between medieval and contemporary American Jewish apostates who are willing to sacrifice the Jewish state for the sake of “justice” and, in fact, to make them look good in the eyes of non-Jews.
Alexander uses the term “Jewish suicidalism.” However, this term refers to the behavior of Jewish apostates who are only willing to sacrifice the “wrong” Israeli Jews. In the essay Why Jews Should Behave Better Than Others, Alexander explores the “false moral symmetry and double standards” that are usually applied to Israel but “not to other nations, at least not to all Arab states.” He writes: “In averting their eyes from the destruction of European Jews, Jewish intellectuals of the ‘first rank’ also fail to look at one of the most impressive manifestations of the will to live of a martyred people” [the people of Israel].
American scholar Sander Gilman writes, “One of the most recent forms of Jewish self-loathing is fierce opposition to the existence of the state of Israel.” Israel hinders the self-hating Jews of the West because its actions prevent it from gaining the popularity and love of the world public for a Jewish people that looks “unseemly” and “unrespectable.”
However, Israel wants to exist, not to please. It does not behave comme il faut, nor does it make concessions to the Palestinian Arabs. Some modern Western Jews see the Jewish state’s self-defense line as an obstacle to the victory of liberal values. Israel wants to preserve its existence and therefore fights for the ideals that are secondary to liberalism – patriotism, loyalty to historical traditions, that is, the ideals overthrown by the “progressives.”
Norman Podhoretz, the recently deceased former editor-in-chief of Commentary, noted that liberal Jews explain their adherence to this ideology with compassion: we were slaves in Egypt and must defend the poor, the downtrodden, the refugees. He wrote that liberalism has become the religion of American Jews and is contrary to the conditions for the preservation of the Jewish people and that the liberals’ choice is to sacrifice Jewish interests “in the name of utopias of progress and justice.”
Some American Jews are intoxicated by the religion of liberalism. However, the October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel, among whose victims were both liberals and conservatives, and the Israeli military response to it in Gaza showed the common fate of “progressive” and not “progressive” Jews.
American Jews no longer have the right to consider the tragic events taking place in Israel and Europe as irrelevant to them. American Jews are subject to the law of communicating vessels, connecting them to Jews in Israel and Europe.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education, and the author of 12 books.